Is Canada a Country?

 Is Canada a country?

According to Wikipedia, World Atlas, the CIA Factbook and Britannica, Canada is a country; in fact, the second largest country in the world.  However, Quebec sovereigntists have long claimed that Canada is not a real country.  At the other end of the. . . .whatever we are . . . in a Macleans article published in 2018, Scott Gilmore is categorical that “Canada is not a country.”  Prophetically, seven years ago, Gilmore pointed out that  

One lesson that the last 20 years has reinforced is that there are far more black swan moments, completely unanticipated game-changing events, out there than we realize. It is almost inevitable that this country is one day going to face some unexpected shock.

As a co-founder of a theatre company committed to producing Canadian plays, then a teacher, and a professor of Canadian Literature and Drama, I have been dealing with the question of “Canadian nationalism” for fifty years.  This “black swan moment”—with the President of the USA musing aloud about Canada becoming a 51st state— is the first time in my experience that Canadian politicians, journalists and the citizenry in general have, at the same time, shown interest in engaging with the question.

The Paradox of Canadian nationalism

The paradox of Canadian nationalism is that Canadians love Canada but they don’t like nationalism.  The solution for the last 50 years now has been to imagine Canada as a “cultural mosaic,” a state with many nations and cultures. Much as I value and celebrate multiculturalism and what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “different ways for belonging,” I recognize the challenge of finding unity, or even consensus, in our diversity.  In this our moment of existential crisis, what appears to be holding us together is disdain for Donald Trump.  It’s not enough.

What are we?

Gilmore underlines that “ We love to revel in our progress as a ‘post-national’ state.”  Then he asks rhetorically, “So if Canada is not a people, not a nation, possibly not even a nation state, what are we?”  In the  reverse psychology of the 1970s, the answer was that Canada was/is a colony.  In theory, in 1867 we ceased to be a British colony and became a country, but as of 2025, we are still requiring an oath of allegiance to King Charles III.  We don’t even have an up-to-date constitution.  We most typically hear about the repatriated archaic constitution when one premier or another threatens to use the “notwithstanding clause” to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms created in 1982. Canada has yet to resolve its treaty issues with First Nations. And without any official declaration, in all practical terms, we have become a branch-plant colony of the USA.  Or, as the Chinese Foreign Minister told our Ambassador, “You are lapdogs of the United States.”  (Gee!  Why would the Chinese think that?)

Gilmore’s Answer

Gilmore’s answer to his rhetorical question:  “we remain the same colour on the map not because of a strong sense of shared identity or a common purpose, but because we simply haven’t had much of a reason to split up. Yet.”  Then came Trump 2.0.  In my last post, I expressed some glimmer of hope that Canadian reaction to Trump would cause us to do the one thing that makes us a country . . .act like a country.  I’ve seen lots of nationalist elan from my friends and the citizenry in general.  Some politicians have begun to say the right things:  noting the willingness of Canadians to respond unitedly to Trumpian threats, talk of bringing down interprovincial trade barriers, and diversifying trade. 

Canada as an “imagined community”

Since the late postmodernist period, since 1983 to be precise and the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the expression “imagined communities” has been used in academic circles to sidestep uncomfortable discussions of nationalism. “Nations,” according the Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind, are just one of many “imagined orders,” fictitious believed-in realities that allow us to develop and progress together. If Canada is going to be a “real country,” beyond disentangling from the domination of the US economy, culture and federation, we must do the very hard work of imagining the Canadian nation, daring to share and receive its cultures and histories with one another, and find reasons for pride and celebration and unity. 

Is Donald Trump the Alien Invader that Canada Needs?

Unlikely Canada:  One more time

 I thought this was the right time to remind readers of my post on “Unlikely Canada,”  Peter Zeihan’s prediction that Canada was unlikely to survive as a country beyond 2030, together with his claim that Alberta was destined to become the 51st American state. Ever since my youthful Canadian nationalist phase in the 1970s, I have rankled at Canada’s acting like an economic branch plant, as well as a cultural and political colony of the USA. The history of Canada has always been a story of its relationship with the USA.   The Canadian Encyclopedia offers a succinct overview of this history, the vacillations from resistance to acquiescence and back again, from  the American Revolution, to the War of 1812, to the Rebellions of 1837,  from John MacDonald’s anti-American grumblings to Wilfred Laurier’s concessions to reciprocity.  We live in the constant shadow of "manifest  destiny." 

A History of back and forth and con jobs

The USA was late to enter the First World War (three years after Canada), but in the 1920s and 30s the similarities between the two countries grew, and with the Second World War, the USA emerged as the great defender of the values Canadians held dear.  Animosity between Diefenbaker and Kennedy kept Canada out of the nuclear arms race. (Diefenbaker blamed American inference for his election loss in 1963.) Pearson kept Canada out of the Vietnam War (politically if not materially), and Pierre Trudeau opened the door to accept American draft evaders.  Flickerings of Canadian nationalism in the 1970s were extinguished with the Reagan-Mulroney bromance in the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  Under Mulroney, Canadian men and women served in George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 1990-91.  (You may remember how we were conned by a young girl claiming to be a nurse telling stories of Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of their incubators.  She turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.  See Petrodollar Warfare.)  Jean Chrétien  kept Canada out of George W. Bush’s bogus-WMD war in Iraq in 2003.  

After the Harper Conservatives had negotiated and signed the Canada-China  Foreign Investment Promotion and Protecton Agreement, the Justin Trudeau Liberals were elected, in 2015, on the promise of a free-trade agreement with China,  Canada’s second largest trading partner and only leverage against total US economic domination.  [The Government of Canada web site on Canada-China free trade has been removed since I posted a link to it on 11 October 2024.  See Pubic Inquiry on Foreign Interference] * In 2016, Donald Trump was elected as US President.  Unbeknownst to President Trump, his National Security Advisor, John Bolton hatched a plot in 2018 to make Canada the patsy by having the RCMP arrest the CFO of Huawei  ensuring the breakdown of trade relations between Canada and China.  Far from garnering respect and appreciation from the Americans, our mindless acquiescence to US interests in detriment to our own has made us appear weak, inept and fearful.  The newly elected US President will not hesitate to exploit our ineptitude, weakness and fear.

The Merger: For and against  (Conrad Black against!?!?)

In my faulty memory Conrad Black, one-time Canadian owner of the world’s third-largest newspaper empire, was an advocate of Canada joining the USA.  I therefore read with great interest his critique and rebuttal of Diane Francis’s book, The Merger of the Century:  Why Canada and the USA Should Become One Country. In his editorial (18 Jan. 2014), Black claims, “I was for a time reviled [. . . ] by some of the traditional, leftist Canadian nationalists, [that would be me] though I was never an annexationist.” 

As Francis was promoting her book, arguing that the merger was already underway and nigh on inevitable,  Black countered that   

Canada is, by every measure, a better-governed country than the United States, and much of this is new in the last 30 years. Not even the multi-trillion-dollar pay-off Diane Francis envisions would be an adequate compensation to Canadians to take such a great leap backwards in good government.

Diane Francis in 2014

Diane Francis laid out the basic arguments of her book in a lecture at the University of Western Ontario in 2014.

Diane Francis in 2025

Interviewed last week, Francis’s perspective seemed to have shifted slightly, as she emphasized the last chapter of her book on what Canada had to do if there was no merger with the USA:  end tariff barriers between provinces, take over the defence of its own borders and coastline, expand its business and trade options.  However, in the recent interview, she did return to the notion of Canada and the USA becoming a single federation, following a European Union economic model.

Can We now start talking about the US threat to Canadian sovereignty and independence, or should we maintain our focus on Chinese influence on Canadian elections?

One point that particularly struck me in this recent interview is her claim that she was blacklisted by the media as she attempted to promote her book in 2014.  Perhaps we would have benefited from having a more robust conversation ten years ago.  I tried to to make this point, from a very different perspective, in 2002, at a conference presentation at the University of Toronto: “ I am prepared to be unsentimental about the destiny of the Canadian nation, but I would consider it a tragedy if Canadians did not participate fully in the exchange and debate and decision-making process.

Will Trump force us to start acting like a sovereign nation?

Back to the question.  In theory, it is thought that an external threat is sometimes what a nation needs to appreciate the value of its sovereignty, to generate solidarity and unity.  For a moment I thought Donald Trump might be that beneficial threat.  Unfortunately, so far the response has been lip service and chaos.  And Danielle Smith has already responded like the Governor of Alberta, the 51st state, as predicted by Peter Zeihan: holding one-on-one meetings with President-elect Trump and refusing to join with Canadian Premiers and the Prime Minister in threatening to cut off energy supplies from Canada to the USA in the event of a trade war.  The survival of Canada may still not be “unlikely” but it is looking less and less likely these days. 

Addendum

* After a bit of searching I found another Government of Canada web page which makes reference to the Canada-China Free Trade Agreement which was in the exploratory stages in 2016.

Why Does Everyone Care So Much about This Huawei Issue?

The Huawei case matters to Canadians

I don’t know about “everyone,” but I can tell you why I, as a Canadian, “care so much about the Huawei issue.” In theory Canada and the USA are independent countries and trading partners. However, for most of my adult life, I have been aware of the argument that in practice the relationship is more like a colony and the empire which controls that colony. In this kind of colony-empire relationship the colony can benefit from the relationship and pursue its own interests, but when the interests of the colony and the interests of the empire are in conflict, the colony must always give priority to the interests of the empire. No case in my life time has more acutely demonstrated Canada acting against its own interests in order to serve the interests of the USA than the arrest and extradition of the Huawei CFO.

Diversifying our trading partners versus "the China clause"

As an independent country it is in Canada’s obvious interest to diversify its trading partners, to establish trading relations with other countries and most importantly with China, the second largest and fastest growing economy on the planet. It is in Canada’s interest to adopt Huawei’s 5G technology, and to benefit from the jobs and research that Huawei Canada has to offer. The Americans have made their opposition to Canada-China trade relations clear by insisting on what is known as “the China clause” in the recent US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement.

Arresting Meng blocks Canada's trade with China:  who benefits?

Requiring Canada to arrest Meng (she could have been arrested in numerous other countries) had strategic value for US interests: by causing a rift between China and Canada. Thus the Americans doubly insured that trade negotiations between the two countries would be halted. However, it is not American behaviour which disturbs me and makes me “care so much about the Huawei case.” The behaviour of Canadian politicians and the Canadian media is what I find incredibly frustrating and disturbing—and makes me care about the Huawei case more than ever.

Are Canadians really honest, law abiding and open-minded?

Canadians tend to think of themselves as honest, law abiding, and open-minded. We admire politicians and media journalists who tell us repeatedly that we are honest, law-abiding and open-minded. As long as we keep hearing this message, we have no reason to question ourselves. We can focus our attention and outrage on “other people” who are not as honest as we are. However, in the Huawei case, our politicians have not been honest, the media has simply repeated the lies and mistakes of our politicians, and two thirds of Canadians have believed what they have been told. We have not followed the law, the Canadian Extradition Act, in the Meng extradition case. We have remained closed-minded, refusing—in the public domain—to even consider that the Meng extradition is not in keeping with Canadian law. The Canadian ambassador to China was fired by the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, just for saying that Meng had a strong case—which experts agreed was obvious. The new Justice Minister, David Lametti (the former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was demoted in the middle of Meng case) has decided to proceed with the Meng extradition. What chance was there that he would decide against extradition when his boss, the Prime Minister, had fired the ambassador, just for saying that not extraditing Meng was a possible outcome? Despite this obvious political interference and the new Justice Minister saying publicly that extradition is “political,” you will still hear politicians, journalists and people in general in Canada insisting that the Meng extradition is a “non-political, judicial” affair.

Why are Canadians operating against their own best interests?

Why are Canadians behaving this way? This is where the case gets so sad and I find myself caring so much. The only reason I can see (other than a total lack of awareness) that our politicians, our media and people in general would behave this way is that they have automatically adopted the attitude of the victim, of the colony, and are convinced that if we don’t do what we think the USA wants, we will be severely punished. How pathetic! We had ample reason to reject the initial warrant: the US Attorney, Richard Donoghue, who issued the warrant, was in a conflict of interest. We had ample reason to deny extradition: it was obviously political, based on Meng’s nationality and ethnicity, and there was no precedent for arresting an executive in this type of case. The Americans (in general) would have accepted our legal arguments and might even have respected our independence, but instead we reverted to cowering acquiescence and the self-delusion that we Canadians are honest, law-abiding and open-minded.